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Guest opinion: Boulder's housing challenge -- Buyer be there

By Ed Byrne

Posted:
02/20/2013 01:00:00 AM MST

For more than 50 years, Boulder has experimented with conventional suburban zoning and auto-dependent land use planning. The dream -- driving everywhere to do almost everything will be possible forever -- has become a nightmare. The result is sprawling, single-use residential, retail, office and industrial zone districts, traffic congestion, and an unsustainable carbon footprint.

Boulder has benefited financially from high demand fueled by our wonderful climate, creative people and idyllic setting. Our supply of land/space has been limited by the Blue Line, the 55-foot height limit, residential growth caps, and open space purchases that surround Boulder, creating an urban growth boundary. High demand and limited supply lit a fire under every sector of our real estate market. To make matters worse, Californians fleeing Prop. 13 in 1993 bid home prices up even further, sheltering their capital gains.

Some in Boulder's middle class fled to the suburbs to find affordable places to sleep. We lost good neighbors and talented civic volunteers. Many return to Boulder on weekdays to work, using our streets, city services and other infrastructure (through no fault of their own), while remaining part of our carbon footprint.

What's an environmentally conscious, ethically sensitive city supposed to do? Our inequality of wealth is increasing, along with traffic congestion and pollution. Even a sustainable regional future is becoming harder to achieve. Resort economies in Colorado function in a similar way: workers are moving further and further down valley. Is this Boulder's destiny? Do we want it to be? Can we do anything to stop it?

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Choices matter. When employees drive until they qualify, they are trading housing costs for commuting costs. Pick a vector: if they're sleeping in Longmont, Niwot, Erie, Lafayette, Louisville or Superior, their commute to Boulder is only going to get worse and more expensive.

Some expatriate in-commuters may want to move back to Boulder, opting to buy a smaller home, or an apartment or condominium, preferably near a park and a good school. It could be in a neighborhood center -- a mixed use collection of small retail, offices, live-work and modest dwelling units, with restaurants, a coffee shop, or an ice cream parlor -- well-served by transit. The good news is that we're remembering how to create such great, walkable places. Places where you stroll with neighbors while doing errands, instead of waving from your car. We're even beginning to see them built in Boulder again.

We don't need any more dwelling units here that aren't at least attractive to in-commuting members of Boulder's workforce, to Boulder's elderly seeking to simplify their lives, and to Boulder's young people, many of them our children, hoping to gain a foothold here.

We should ask each of these different demographic groups what type of house or community, with what sort of amenities, located where, would allow workers to trade in their worsening commutes, while also permitting some of our elderly (our wisdom) and our youth to continue to call Boulder "home."

We haven't been able to convince voters to pay more in taxes to help our working poor, so it is unlikely we will agree to subsidize a return of the middle class to Boulder. We can, however, approve projects that are in the right place, serving the right people, for the right reasons, benefiting us all.

The homes and units will need to be down-sized to be price competitive. They will also need to be strategically located to minimize traffic impacts and to provide critical mass for a re-centering of Boulder's sprawling residential and non-residential subdivision "experiments." In time (half a century, perhaps, to correct a 60-year mistake), these single-use enclaves may evolve towards primary self-sufficiency, enabling a more diverse mix of Boulder citizens to live, work, shop and play closer to where they sleep.

This is the challenge of our age: creating human settlement patterns that will enable people and the ecosystems in which we live to thrive in a hydrocarbon-sipping world, before it's too late! True sustainability in Boulder will begin when we allow right-sized housing options to be built for many of the people who are already here -- our fellow workers, our elderly, and our children -- and, more importantly, when they start choosing to occupy them, instead of their cars.

Ed Byrne, of Boulder, is on the Daily Camera's editorial advisory board.

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